Struggling To Bridge the Casual-Hardcore Game Gap 185
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Soulskill
from the need-more-retro-mega-man-titles dept.
from the need-more-retro-mega-man-titles dept.
With the advent of the Wii and the upcoming motion control systems from Sony and Microsoft, console makers are expanding the gaming population to include vast numbers of casual players. Their problem now, according to this editorial at Eurogamer, is that there doesn't exist a broad selection of games between the simple, introductory titles and the complex, hardcore ones, which tends to limit how deep new players will venture into the gaming ecosystem. Quoting:
"... it needs software that spans the gap between the two camps of offerings which are emerging on Xbox 360 — games that encourage players of Dance Central or Your Shape to move upstream and explore. It's unlikely, perhaps, that they'll ever end up curb-stomping crinkle-faced nasties in Cliff Bleszinski's latest, but we're a long way past the point of the Xbox being all about shooting and driving, even if the public perception hasn't quite moved with the software line-up. The long-term challenge for the games market must, ultimately, be to emulate the success which other mediums have had in creating markets where consumers routinely and happily move between genres, and where franchises which would be pigeonholed as 'hardcore' in the games world nestle comfortably in people's DVD collections alongside those which would be dismissed as 'casual.'"
Whatever Happened... (Score:3, Insightful)
Has anyone considered... (Score:4, Insightful)
... casual gamers just aren't that interested in gaming to begin with? There doesn't need to be more "intermediate" games where casuals "graduate up" the gaming ladder. The truth is you are either invested in games or you are not, period.
Quite frankly I see this whole casual craze as a bubble that's going to pop.
The gap is permanent (Score:4, Insightful)
Just (Score:1, Insightful)
Public Perception is off? (Score:5, Insightful)
How long is long past? Maybe I'm just not paying enough attention and part of the unwashed masses, but after I bought an Xbox 360 last year to play rock band 2 I decided to search out some games to retroactively justify purchasing the console for one game. I have purchased no other games since. The only games available seem to consist mainly of FPS/3rd person shooters (which I'm not interested in playing outside of a PC environment) and driving games that I was never interested in. There's a handful of RPGs that I might be interested in I suppose, but those are often available on the PC as well and I kind of lack the time to play them these days.
Again, maybe some one deeper into console games can enlighten me...but my piece of the public perception is that the Xbox is still all about shooting and driving.
Is the board game industry... (Score:5, Insightful)
Life Life Life (Score:5, Insightful)
Now the people that are playing "casual" games would much prefer watching TV over gaming. Those people will never be able to be converted to a more involved type of game.
Look at all the people that play Farmville. My wife even got into it and she HATES video games. And after a short time she bailed on it. Why? because she doesn't want to invest time into a useless endeavor.
Give her something more complex that might not be a "waste of time" and she gets frustrated because she wants a zero learning curve. Zero learning curve tends to mean something less then advanced. It's an evil little circle that might be impossible to overcome.
The untapped market will more likely than not remain untapped.
Re:The gap is permanent (Score:2, Insightful)
Especially talking about the controls.
As somebody said in an article, the gamers today have been slowly brought up with more and more buttons and controls:
NES had 2 Buttons => SNES which had 6 buttons => Playstation 8 buttons (and later analogue joysticks with two "buttons") and so on.
I mean I had some trouble to use two buttons when I was small, but going directly for 8? Half impossible if you ask me...
Re:Has anyone considered... (Score:4, Insightful)
Casual gamers are looking for a low cost of entry, no subscriptions or long term commitments, and games that don't require hours and hour of their time. It's one of the reasons the low cost, easy to play smartphone type games are popular. Each one is only a few dollars and is available for immediate download. They've become a digital impulse item. No going to a store, and you don't have to go to a computer or even leave your couch. Just download, play and kill a few minutes here and there.
Re:Has anyone considered... (Score:3, Insightful)
See what I did there? Mega corporations marketing departments market these technologies as "gotta have it" to the general populus and they eat it up as they're intended to.
Anyway, just because the idiots like it and everyone will "eventually" use it, doesn't mean that it's crappy technology. Technology is an ends to a mean, not a mean in itself.
"bridging the gap" (Score:5, Insightful)
That's like bridging the gap between coffee and coke. It's like bridging the gap between whiskey and wine. You are only going to create some crap that no one likes.
What needs to die is this attitude that what we need to do is make games that appeal to everyone, so that every person in the population buys it. That's stupid. It's chasing an impossible dream. You are far better off just making a good game that a certain set of people like. You can't appeal to everyone, so pick a genre, "casual", "hardcore" or whatever, and make something good in that genre. You aren't going to make a game that appeals to both grandma and Twitchy McFragerton, so stop trying. You're just going to end up with some crap that both grandma and Twitchy agree is worthless.
Re:Life Life Life (Score:2, Insightful)
Play a co-op game with her. If she's struggling with a learning curve, teach her, and you'll get to spend time together as an added bonus. All good hobbies require training or practice, gaming is no different.
I recommend something you're good at, so you can pick up the slack in the beginning and not have to play on easy mode. I personally used Gears of War but I think any co-op game with a forgiving injury system would work.
Re:Has anyone considered... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Geeks often dismiss new technologies."
You mean like the Sega CD, the 32X, the SNES Zapper, the power glove, virtual boy and R.O.B.?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.O.B [wikipedia.org].
Not all technologies pan out. The Virtual boy was 3D and the original Gameboy was a black and white lcd.
Re:Has anyone considered... (Score:5, Insightful)
Likewise videophones were first demonstrated many decades ago and they still haven't taken off. The main reason being that except in extremely long distance communications like in and out of a war zone, people just don't want to have to put on pants and a shirt to take a telephone call.
I don't think Kinect will catch on to the extent that you do. It's cool, but I'm not sure that it'll truly overcome the problem of games being about escape. Nintendo had a controller back in the 80s which has been emulated a few times in games like DDR, but even that hasn't particularly caught on. The Wiimote has really come the closest, but I'm not sure if it's truly here to stay or not, it depends solely upon how much it adds to the game.
Re:The gap is permanent (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the things I like about Wolfenstein 3d, the Catacombs Abyss and Doom was that the game play was simplified. Admittedly that was a decision driven entirely by technological restraints, but not having to use a mouse, and only having to worry about 3 buttons, plus the movement and weapon change made things a lot more fun. Sure it wasn't technically accurate, however it did simplify getting into it and make it a lot less daunting to get involved with things like deathmatches.
Re:"bridging the gap" (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree with the point you are making but let me provide a counter point. If the game you are making takes 1-4 years and costs between 12-18 million you have to have at least a reasonable chance of making that back which means you have to have as broad of a market as possible. Game making is still a business. They still need to turn a profit.
With that said, I think the best solution would be to focus and make a fun game as you mentioned but try and make it cheaper. This is also one of the reasons why the Wii is doing so well. Casual games are much cheaper to make.
Am I a casual gamer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then I stopped playing.
I guess I grew up. Or something.
I've always felt like a gamer at heart, but I came to realize that even though games are looking prettier and prettier, they are feeling rather empty. Maybe it was just the thrill of being a kid discovering new worlds that hooked me, and now that I'm an adult I don't have the time to be sucked in anymore. I certainly don't have the time to play games all day.
Until the Wii came, I did keep an eye on the gaming market, but I definitely wasn't interested in getting a new console.
The Wii was the first console in many years that created a small spark of desire inside of me to go back to playing games.
I think, as someone said, that Nintendo isn't competing with Sony and Microsoft these days, as much as they are competing with disinterest.
But... Am I a casual gamer? I suppose I am, now. But I used to be "hardcore". Nintendo managed to drag me back into gaming, at least partially. I think that might be part of their success -- winning over disinterested traditional gamers such as myself.
For all the bashing of "casual" games for the Wii, didn't any of you notice that, in, fact games of the past were usually quite simplistic? They may have been hard to play all the way through, but they certainly weren't the monsters of bloated cutscenes and story lines we have today.
Frankly, I'm getting sick of the whining about "casual games destroying the market". Accessible games means that people like me get to pick them up and play, and not have to invest many hours a day to do so. Ok, I admit I played through Super Mario Galaxy and managed to unlock Luigi. But it just doesn't feel like the "good old days".
Re:Public Perception is off? (Score:3, Insightful)
Lego Star Wars/Indy Jones/Batman and now Lego Harry Potter is coming. Those games are perfect for a parent to play with their kid. They have a lot of replay value.
I'd also suggest looking at Xbox Live Arcade games. Off the top of my head, Kingdom For Keflings, Pacman Champ Edition, Carcassonne, Ticket To Ride, Puzzle Arcade, Monkey Island (humour might be unsuitable for a 7yo, not sure), Geometry Wars 2 (it's not as hard as the first one and has more game modes).
There's a huge number of downloadable games, the good thing is they all are demos of themselves - if you like it you just buy and it unlocks.
Re:Has anyone considered... (Score:3, Insightful)
Defining a game as hardcore because of total complexity leaves you without useful data. We know Pokemon is a game that appeals to people who aren't big into gaming. A game's values are defined by the customer and the customers of Pokemon define it as a newbie-friendly game so it is a newbie-friendly game, no matter what the game's code or anything else says. Time to finish is completely irrelevant. If you think casual gamers are only interested in shallow short games with no content you would get torn apart by Nintendo if you tried to enter that market. The common belief that casual gamers are stupid has ruined more than one company.
Re:Has anyone considered... (Score:2, Insightful)
Having worked at Zynga, I can say with confidence that the reason there are 85 million Farmville players comes down to two things, neither of which involve good gameplay or tailoring of experience to audience:
1) $1 million plus in advertising per week in Facebook ads alone ( http://www.businessinsider.com/gossip-2009-11 [businessinsider.com] ). My personal experience there corroborates this number, and I can confirm that they spend similar numbers on other advertising venues.
2) A ruthless focus on acquisition, regardless of tactic. Policy violation and "we're shutting you down if you don't stop doing X in your apps" emails received from Facebook and MySpace ran about 2 a week while I was there. If they find a way to exploit an API or work around the system to spam people, they'll do it. The most recent one I've seen is dynamically generated apps whose sole purpose is to get new Farmville invites into your request queue to work around the "block this app" functionality in Facebook. If they can get away with temporarily turning a feature off so the policy violations disappear and then turn it back on a week later, they'll do that, too.
The typical lifespan of a Zynga player ( >95% ) is one play session, ( ~5% ) play for 3 days and then are never heard from again, and (0.001% or less, depending on game) sticking around for the long term. The money is made during the first three play sessions, primarily via completion of affiliate offers (65-90% of all revenue, depending on game), with the rest coming from direct purchase of virtual goods by the 0.001% that stick around.
Generally speaking, there are 4 ways of maintaining a player base - acquisition, interest, retention, and reactivation. Zynga is a master of acquisition with a moderately large internal focus on reactivation (Farmville's gameplay is almost exclusively a reactivation device). They spend very little on interest, just enough to get people in the door. Anything focused on retention is actively discouraged; the entire organization employs fewer than 15 QA persons in total, who also double as customer service - this should give you an idea as to their strategy here. Seriously - I was actively disciplined for reducing game downtime and resolving major bugs that interfered with gameplay, and the division I worked in (servicing > 800,000 active players/day at the time) reduced its QA+customer service staff from 7 to 2 because "QA was slowing things down too much".
This relentless focus on acquisition is why Farmville has 85 million players - nothing more. The corollary lesson being that if you want to be the next Zynga, start with a $50 million advertising budget and a weak sense of ethics - the rest will fall out naturally from there.